Cold Nights by Ba Jin
Published 1947 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, War
How hard is Cold Nights to read?
Cold Nights scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 44 out of 100
- Plain modern vernacular in a narrow domestic register, with wartime Chongqing detail supplying most of the specialised vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Short sentences and repetitive interior monologue, deliberately flattened to match the narrator's exhaustion.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- Stays with rent, medicine and food; the argument about what the war did to ordinary decency is never stated.
- Information density: 46 out of 100
- Three characters and two rooms over one year, with wartime conditions sketched rather than documented.
- Narrative indirection: 56 out of 100
- Told largely through Wenxuan's evasions and self-justifications, so the reader must judge a marriage from the account of its least reliable member.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The cold, the air raid sirens and the celebration fireworks over a dying man are the book's only figurative pressure, and it is applied once.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- The victory celebration that fills the street while the protagonist dies in it is the sharpest ironic construction in modern Chinese fiction.
- Resolution withholding: 76 out of 100
- The wife returns to find no rooms, no grave and no one who can tell her anything, and the novel ends there.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- A linear domestic narrative with a short coda from the wife's point of view.
How Cold Nights is regarded
Cold Nights holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.